Vegan cooking, crafting, and other medieval fun

Archive for the category “Food”

Halloween (or Hallows eve) is over and it’s now All Saints Day (or All Hallows), a day for remembering and honoring those exceptional Christians who have gone before us. Tomorrow will be All Souls day, set aside for remembering all the faithful departed. This, then, is a season for remembering the dead and all that entails: prayers, visiting and tending to the graves of loved ones, and baking. In Medieval England the poor and children would go door to door (a proto-trick or treating) and collect cakes and sweets in exchange for singing carols and for praying for the dead. This was known as souling and the cakes were called soul cakes. So today seemed like a fitting day to try out making some soul cakes.

While not Medieval, there is a traditional English song that you can listen to here.

I used a recipe from food.com but subbed out vegan butter, egg replacer, and almond milk. They look like cookies to me but are really more of a biscuit. I think they would go well with some tea as they aren’t too sweet and have a nice, crumbly texture.

Well I just discovered some pictures of one of my lenten meals that I never posted. This one is called Maghmuma and is another recipe eaten by monks and Christians during lent. It’s a layered vegetable dish with bread and came out like a very hearty stew.

Lent is a great opportunity for the Medieval Vegan since it was a time of fasting and so the foods eaten are a lot closer to what I’ve been cooking. Of course the medieval Christian would still count fish (and sometimes any meat that they made to look like fish) but even so there are a number of recipes that are truly vegan.

This first one was a fava bean recipe with a very strong sesame seed and lemon flavor to it. I’d never eaten fava beans before and they are very earthy. Even with the unusually strong sesame oil flavor it was a good and hearty dish.

Had a great dinner of Odessa Style Mushrooms, asparagus, and apple pudding. The mushrooms were incredibly rich and delicious. The apple pudding was a surprisingly good pairing with it and was something I certainly would have never thought to try.

Drank a glass of Riesling with the meal and ate the mushrooms with some bread.

This was a simple bread recipe that isn’t authentic but is inspired by medieval cooking. I ended up not using yeast though, I had read a lot about yeast being rare in medieval breads and wanted to try it. It was basically a very dense biscuit and so I ate it with jam.

Went with a Mediterranean dish this time. This is another one of those dishes that isn’t very pretty but tastes awesome. The first time I cooked this I accidentally cooked the potatoes at 200 F instead of 200 C which led to a lot of confusion for me. The changes I made for this recipe was to leave the skins on the potatoes, left out the yogurt, and wasn’t sure what beans the recipe was talking about so I just stuck with the chickpeas it also listed.

I made a 14th century French mushroom and ‘cheese’ pie (Mushroom Pasty) using daiya mozzarella cheese. An apple tart (Tartys In Applis) and a dish of peas (Perry of Pesoun) both from 14th century England. The only changes I made to this recipe is using a vegan cheese and subbing the tart crust for a pie crust because I was lazy, and of course still no saffron.

I went with a side dish tonight. Wouldn’t of thought to use such sweet seasonings with cauliflower but the flavor was actually very subtle and it was appropriate as a vegetable side. I left out the egg garnish for obvious reasons and the currants because I didn’t have any. They probably would have added a lot to the recipe though.